Quite Completely Insane

Just found this via Opinion Journal. This guy proposes a serious analogy between losing the election and being a battered wife. I look at this, and I say, "What the hell?!? This is demented!" Read it all, here's how it ends:

First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don’t do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don’t do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less is you don’t resist and fight back. Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 56 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you’ve learned, and that you aren’t going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 56 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it’s better than the abuse.

We have a mandate to be as radical and liberal and steadfast as we need to be. The progressive beliefs and social justice we stand for, our core, must not be altered. We are 56 million strong. We are building from the bottom up. We are meeting, on the net, in church basements, at work, in small groups, and right now, we are crying, because we are trying to break free and we don’t know how.

Any battered woman in America, any oppressed person around the globe who has defied her oppressor will tell you this: There is nothing wrong with you. You are in good company. You are safe. You are not alone. You are strong. You must change only one thing: stop responding to the abuser. Don’t let him dictate the terms or frame the debate (he’ll win, not because he’s right, but because force works). Sure, we can build a better grassroots campaign, cultivate and raise up better leaders, reform the election system to make it failproof, stick to our message, learn from the strategy of the other side. But we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, “loose”, irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct. We have the mandate of the world to back us, and the legacy of oppressed people throughout history.

Even if you do everything right, they’ll hit you anyway. Look at the poor souls who voted for this nonsense. They are working for six dollars an hour if they are working at all, their children are dying overseas and suffering from lack of health care and a depleted environment and a shoddy education. And they don’t even know they are being hit.

Now that was in yesterday's Opinion Journal. In today's we have, from a reader who is a psychologist who specializes in marital therapy, this great response which turns the analogy on its head:

Gilles takes the position that the Democrats are looking a lot like a battered wife, and there is something to this. Some of the behaviors do overlap. But the logic breaks down immediately. Gilles sets it up so that the partner in this analogy is the Republicans, who defeated them. And she suggests that the 56 million Kerry voters form a kind of really big support group to get by. But where does this lead? And specifically what are they going to do about the next election? Is Gilles suggesting that they secede and only deal with good folks like themselves? Because if they come back to contest the next election, they are going back to the abusive spouse, something that no one in the domestic violence field is ever going to feel too good about.

A better analogy is that the partner is the country as a whole. The marital analogy is a good one if we see the Democrats as the rejected spouse and the U.S. as the rejecter. This makes much more sense. The insistence on recounts is like the husband who stalks his ex-wife, who doesn't understand what "no" means. The denial, the rationalizations, the vilification, the aimless depression are all typical of someone who's in the early stages of rejection and can't figure out what to do next. Likewise, Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton experimenting with finding religion look a lot like someone trying anything to get the partner back. "Maybe if I get a hairpiece, she'll come home."

Gilles also errs in assuming that since the Democrats are acting battered that someone must be battering them. It doesn't work that way. As the saying goes, "If you walk around with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Closer to home, if you walk around with control issues everyone looks like a bully.